You Decide: Has the population boom fizzled?

By Dr. Mike Walden | Mar 15, 2013

NewsWhen I was in college four decades ago, one of the headline concernswas overpopulation. Worries were just beginning about what more peoplewould mean for the food supply, the availability of clean water andthe price of everything from gas to lumber to clothing. Direpredictions were made for widespread starvation and plunging livingstandards.

This wasn’t the first time that society had fretted aboutoverpopulation. In the 19th century a British scholar named ThomasMalthus predicted that increased numbers of people would inevitablylead to disease, famine and a long-run trend to subsistence living.

Advances in agricultural productivity proved Malthus wrong for a largepart of the world. But today another trend may be a more significantundoing of Malthus’ predictions. Instead of the world facing thecontinuing challenge of an increasing population, just the oppositemay be emerging — a world facing depopulation, and by choice!

Birth rates (technically the term is “total fertility rate,” or theaverage number of babies born to each woman) are falling all aroundthe world. And it isn’t because babies are dying shortly after birth.It’s because women are having fewer babies. Many demographers are nowsaying the big problem of the future will not be too many people;instead, it will be too few people.In fact, many countries — China, Japan, Italy and Russia are examples— are already losing population. If current trends continue, each ofthese countries will be 20 percent to 30 percent smaller in populationby the end of the century. The U.S. currently isn’t in that situation— our country now has a total fertility rate above replacement level— but that could change in the future. Demographers have noted thatfalling fertility rates are common across all nationalities and ethnicbackgrounds.But why? Several factors are likely at play. Many women are delayingchildbirth as they stay in school longer and pursue their own workcareers. Studies have shown that the longer a woman waits to havechildren, the fewer children she will have.In agrarian societies, children were an asset as they helped on thefarm with the planting and harvesting and in the home with cooking,canning and mending. I can remember my father entertaining me withstories about rising at 4 a.m. to milk the cows, feed the hogs andchase down stray sheep.But those days are gone for most of our country and increasingly forthe rest of the world. Family farms are disappearing, and today’sfarms are big, mechanized and run like a corporation. From a purelyeconomic point of view, children are a cost with very little financialreturn.Children also used to perform another important function for theirparents later in life. They supported their parents. I have vividmemories of this role from my maternal grandfather. He had threedaughters (one was my mother), and in the last decade of his life, healternated living with each daughter. His daughters were his pension!This too has changed. Social Security, Medicare, private pensions andpersonal savings have allowed many — certainly not all — olderadults to live separately from their children, often in differentstates. So the motivation to have children to ensure care and supportlater in one’s life just isn’t as strong today.So what are we to make of the trend toward depopulation? Certainlythere are mixed impacts. Some see pluses from reduced use of naturalresources, a smaller human imprint on the environment and simply moreopen space and less crowding if there are fewer people on the planet.They see the potential for an increase in the quality of life for thefewer quantity of people.But others aren’t so sure. Fewer people obviously mean not as manyindividuals to do work, to innovate and to make path-breakingcontributions. The stock market could also suffer if older people sellstocks to finance their retirement, but there are fewer younger folksto purchase those stocks.Most analysts agree the big federal programs that assist the elderly— Social Security and Medicare — would be severely challenged bydepopulation. This is because their funding relies in part oncontributions from younger workers.

Several counties, like Japan and Russia, have implemented public policies to encourage a higher birth rate, but to no avail. Apparently the forces driving societies to have fewer children are stronger than anything government can change.

The longer I live, the more examples I have seen of the conventional wisdom being turned on its head. For centuries many have worried about the impacts of a population explosion. Now the concern may be totally flipped around — to depopulation. Could the emerging demographic implosion be our greatest challenge ever? You decide.

Dr. Mike Walden is a William Neal Reynolds Professor and NorthCarolina Cooperative Extension economist in the Department ofAgricultural and Resource Economics of N.C. State University’s Collegeof Agriculture and Life Sciences. He teaches and writes on personalfinance, economic outlook and public policy. The College ofAgriculture and Life Sciences communications unit provides his YouDecide column every two weeks. Previous columns are available athttp://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agcomm/news-center/tag/you-decide